 Wow, three amazing talks. I'd like to open up the floor now for your questions. Do we have a first brave person with a question in the front row? Thank you. Hi, my name is Rose. I work for Transparency International UK. My question is for Eshbun. In Parliament Watch's campaign to share what we're talking about on Twitter, did you get any pushback from Parliament to sort of downplay anything that made them not look good, or did you sense that maybe they weren't having conversations that they would have had if you weren't in the room, and how did you respond to that? Thank you. Yes, so there's been a lot of pushback from Parliament, and how do we respond to it? Essentially, like I said, Parliament is a very difficult institution to access. So a lot of our work is really dependent on how much access they give us. So what we've done, or what we've been very specific to do, is to cultivate relationships with the speaker, as well as the mainstream press. So for the few times when we haven't been able to tweet or to publish, or to have our work on Facebook, what we do, or what has happened, is that a lot of people in the online community have come in to say, guys, we're not getting this information from you. We had something that we called Accountability Friday, where every Friday we would put up information from the Auditor General's report. And the day we missed Accountability Friday, luckily for us, the online community, or the Twitter community in Uganda, came out and said, oh, Parliament Watch, what's happening? Where's Accountability Friday? So we use some subtle things like that to quote-in-quote blackmail Parliament and say we are needed so that when they're not happy with us, the backlash is not too bad. But they also know in many ways that, like I said, our work is to publish information, whether it makes them look good or bad. And sometimes they have some good content out there, so they also know that there's a benefit in maintaining a relationship with us. We had a... Thanks, all three for your presentations. Really interesting material. My name is Catherine. I work at Open Contracting Partnership. We're the organization that maintains the Open Contracting Data Standards, so Jamil actually had a question for you. So in designing the standard and later, the technical advice that we give about how to implement the standard, we keep use cases at the forefront. So we want to make sure that whatever data is published is ultimately used, and that really means that we need to focus on who's using the data, how they're using it, what formats it needs to be in. And one of the biggest challenges that we face is that governments are very on-board with the idea of transparency and anti-corruption and all these really big, nebulous terms. But it's really hard to create spaces where we can have government talk to civil society and talking to private sector to identify the really specific use cases and how concretely to use these data. So I was wondering if, in your experiences, you could give any advice on how to create those spaces and make sure there are safe spaces that everyone's voices heard. Thank you. I mean, you're the experts in Open Contracting, so I won't get too much into the specifics on that, but we have found that on a lot of the issues that we're tracking through my project, we kind of have a good bridge between government and other civil society groups. We have a pretty good, I would like to say, reputation as being fairly government-friendly, although critical we want to, but a good thing between the two of them. Specifically on Open Contracting and the data, how you want the data to be. In TRUK, we don't, I don't know, I don't think that we have anybody that's looking at it specifically, although we have tracked that it's started to be implemented, although we recognize it's not the highest, the most advanced rung yet, I think is the way it is. But in terms of advice on how to bring people together, it's just trying to get government to do that themselves. At the moment the government is very willing to do that, but it's just pushing them to do it themselves without asking them to. I think it's what we'd say. My name is John Buckley, I'm an Irish experience designer. My question is for Ashban. And essentially, I'm just curious about the citizens who engaged on Twitter. Do you know who they are, were they politically engaged before, or do you think you opened up parliament and government and democracy and engaged with two new people? So far the data that we've been... Okay, sure. So far the data that we've been able to collect on the audiences or on the followers that we have on Twitter is only segmented in as far as age, what kind of devices they use and gender as well. So yeah, I have to say that right now we have no way of knowing whether these were individuals that were politically engaged before. But I'll say that 35% of the users are women and I think that maybe says something about Uganda's society and Uganda's online community and that most of them use smartphones as opposed to laptops, which also tells us what kind of social class they belong to, what kind of social class they belong to and we'll place them somewhere between 15 to 37. Hello, thank you very much for the presentations. My name is Tom Miller, I'm from the European Commission and I'd just like to say my mission expense is forms of open for analysis later on. I had a couple of quick questions for Jamila first of all. You talked about the global pledge tracker and I wondered if there is that much pushback or feedback from that from governments. You talked about government departments in the UK giving you feedback. Have you had feedback from particularly international actors? And second of all for Espan, you talked about the feedback from parliament and the pushback if you like and how you made sure that you were essential to that dialogue. What about from the presidency there? I mean particularly when you're talking about the budget, the presidency budget in Uganda is disproportionate shall we say. Did you have the executive giving you pushback in Uganda? Because I imagine a lot of the countries we work in, that's where the real issue is. I'll go first. So the global one was really interesting. So it followed the same methodology. So we still base, we have asked our chapters in those countries to still base their assessments on what's public and they did that. They researched, they found either there was information or there wasn't and that's what they used to make their assessments and a couple of governments when we published it pushed back and were quite upset that we had said they hadn't acted when they said they had. And then so I think that hopefully in the future iterations it will encourage them to be proactive with publishing just as Louise was saying. I think in general the way that the tool is there's a tendency to think that there's a comparison that can be made between countries. So you can say Spain's doing so well and it's doing way better than ex-country but because of the nature of the commitments you can't actually say that. And often it's the governments themselves that like to pitch themselves against each other in that sense. You can say yes you might have completed more but none of them were new and none of them were ambitious and it was all the bar was so low. So the discourse around it has been interesting. I don't think there's been that much resistance to it but I know that there's an example from Kenya for example our office there when they started to research the work that was being done they went to their different government departments in Kenya and none of their departments even knew these commitments had been made in the first place. So again it's the story of if we hadn't been looking with anything of been done. And so now the things are starting to be pushed a certain direction even if certain departments are a little bit resistant or unsure what to do next. At least it's starting the conversation. Do we have other questions? Okay. Thank you very much. My name is Safia Bicci. Oh, I'm so sorry. Okay. Yeah, so pushback from the presidency. Well, there's been some pushback but the Ugandan president is very subtle. He's not, he's confrontational but also very subtle person. So we did a study on the presidential pledges and it showed that they were close to 300 unfulfilled presidential pledges and almost half of those were, you know, promises that he made in specific districts where he would go and promise electricity or a road, et cetera, and we published that. But to say that there's been any direct pushback from the presidency, no, at least there hasn't and we haven't felt it. Most of the resistance that we get is through institutions such as parliament or other government institutions which would be, you know, the method or the hand that he would use, yeah. Can I go ahead? Go ahead. Okay. My name is Safia Bicci from Yaga Africa based in Nigeria. My question is to parliament switch and thanks for the nice presentation. I was very interested when you talk about the analysis you did on the presentation of women and looking at how probably it reflects the issues discussed around gender or women in the parliament. Did you also consider doing such analysis for the marginalized group like youth and also people with disability to also see how maybe it's a reflection of how the parliament refers to issues that concerns them? Then on the other side, I love the analysis you did around the qualification of the parliament so I don't know if you went ahead to do a comparison with their performance probably using the Uganda scorecard to see whether this reflects the performance or this is against the rationale or the common knowledge that each qualification or the benchmark in terms of their qualification is what reflects to poor parliamentary activities. All right. So when the persons with disabilities, yes, we did that but I didn't have the time to show it. So we have five disabled members of parliament in Uganda and in many ways that's also reflected in the way legislation is passed. We have a persons with disabilities bill that has been in parliament for the last four and a half years now and so they brought it the first time then they took it back because of reasons about it not being clear but you're absolutely right I think because parliament is really a game of numbers so the more numbers that you have the more likely you're going to have your issues prioritised. On education and the scorecard well, when we produce that list of qualifications for members of parliament it compelled us to think does having a PhD make you less sexist? Does having a master's degree make you less homophobic? And I mean clearly it doesn't but also some of the challenges that we have is how to reconcile what we know as the roles of parliament and what the society expects members of parliament to do because when we go into the communities we find that a lot of people have a very distorted understanding of what members of parliament do. In Uganda when they send you to parliament they're not sending you to legislate on death penalty or minimum wage or whatever proposed law. They are essentially sending you to go get a piece of the national cake however you get it and bring back to split with them. So you have MPs who will not say a single word in parliament these are the most silent people but when they go back to their constituencies they'll distribute patronage use their personal resources to extend personal generosity. So in parliament they're doing really badly but in the communities they're rockstars. So when we're putting together a scorecard those are the two things that we must reconcile. Do we go ahead and rate them based on what we think is right or do we completely disregard society's understanding and expectations of what their leaders should present to them. So the scorecard is something that we've been thinking about a lot we are still thinking about because in an ideal world we like to reconcile those two things. Hi, thank you for all your presentations. It's inspiring and it's always good to have success as presented. I'm from France and what we've seen is that it's very difficult for civic tech developers in France to go against the government because usually they depend on the funding from public institutions so my first question was to the three of you how are you funded and how do you manage to not have a conflict of we might not get funding from the government if we publish something. And then I had more specific questions on how you build community because for instance Luisa you mentioned that all these people engaged in the campaign for a short amount of time and I was wondering if they got the response as well when the commission sent back the forms did they get them as well, were they involved in other activities and Jamila I was wondering if maybe you had thought of something similar to focus on companies in addition to institutions it's a difficult question I'm sorry and finally there's an initiative in France it's called Acropolis where what they do is they comment in live what is happening but by video so you have the video of what is happening in the parliament and then there's someone explaining and going back on the issues and sort of making jokes and I was wondering if you had some initiatives like this to also keep building the community over a longer term. So first can you hear me? First in terms of funding for us I guess it was easy in that sense because we have depending on the time period a text it's info from very little to zero public funding so our main funders currently are the Open Society Foundations and a private foundation which is called Adesium that funds work related to democracy participation transparency accountability etc so in that sense it's true that it's easier in terms of field independence to do this kind of campaigns targeting very directly public institutions and in terms of creating community it was certainly a very very big part of the campaign also first to get the campaign running and to manage to file as much request as possible in the shortest amount of time but also to keep the campaign going after we had this setback from the commission so to prepare we reached out to many many organizations with whom we usually work with so it was freedom of information organizations organizations that work on transparency on participation every contact we had with whom we worked earlier and also some members of the academic circles working on transparency people from media outlets we usually work with we told basically everyone that this was happening and we gave them this kind of alert to just spread out the word take part in the campaign cooperation and afterwards we had a list with all the people that had participated in the campaign and we communicated with them consistently throughout the different developments of the campaign so for example when there was this refusal and we had to go to the ombudsman we told the requesters well this is what's happening this is what we plan to do that's how we managed to get the signatures for the European Commission Complaint when we had the first release we also were in contact with them and actually we managed to work with the investigative journalist at NAC because he was one of the persons that had participated in the campaign and when we informed the requesters that this two months disclosure had happened he got in touch immediately and he said well this is very interesting and we said well we're glad we find it you find it interesting why don't we work together so it's this constant communications with them that managed to keep also the campaign together throughout the whole process no we don't get any funding from the public sector one specifically I should tell you that one of the things if you wanted to if you wanted to read a committee report of a meeting that happened in Parliament the only place you would get it would be the Parliament Watch website but Government and Parliament has funding to do these very things but I don't know for some reason they just don't so the way it is structured right now because some of the work that we do is essentially work that they should or would be doing so they keep all the money for themselves on video I think video is the language of the future and literally increasingly we are debating whether we are still interested in doing policy analysis we occasionally publish about four page policy briefs and analysis on issues that are happening in Parliament but more and more we find that nobody is reading it we put it up on the website and it doesn't get any hits but you do a video on the same I mean you have 10,000 hits you have 10,000 views and you have a lot of days so I agree with you absolutely I think video is something that we ought to be doing a little bit more the challenge is that sometimes I guess the way the development world is organised is that sometimes you need consensus or the people that support you you also need the guys in the team to buy and to eat for everybody to know okay you know this is where we are going the very first tracker which was the UK was initially funded by the media network and that was the first year of the project and since then we have received funding to extend the idea to other countries from the UK government so our entire summit follow up project until 2020 is funded by the UK government and we wrapped the UK stuff into that but it is mostly the way that we do that work on whether we would do the same thing or are doing the same thing with businesses I don't think I have the expertise to do that but my colleagues back in London we have a business integrity programme who do a lot of work looking at the efforts that business do to uphold their integrity and see if they are sticking to the standards that they set themselves and the work they do is actually a lot more robust than this I should also say that in the global pledge tracker we include information done by those five international organizations that were there so the IMF, the OECD the UN World Bank and the Commonwealth Secretary are also included in that so not businesses but we are looking at multilaterals as well I think we are now out of time for questions but I encourage you to continue the conversation over lunch there just remains to ask you to join me again in thanking our three fantastic speakers